Turning Boring Data Into Awesome Movies

As reported today on Scientific American, the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), turn terabytes worth of data into majestic astronomic visual treats.

They talk more about the process in the Scientific American piece. For me though, sometimes you just want to see the Universe in all its awesomeness, and leave the data analysis to the experts. (That last statement is a bit ironic since I am a data analyst, but that’s not important right now…)

The first mini-galaxies formed when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Over time, these small galaxies interacted and merged to build up ever larger galaxies, including big spirals like our own Milky Way. Credit:NCSA/NASA/B. O’Shea (MSU) and M. Norman (UC San Diego)

Two spiral galaxies undergo a protracted crash lasting two billion years, eventually merging into a single elliptical galaxy. Credit: NCSA/NASA/B. Robertson (Caltech) and L. Hernquist (Harvard Univ.)

Beginning when the universe is about 20 million years old and continuing to the present day, this visualization provides a glimpse of how the cosmic web may have developed. Credit:NCSA/NASA/R. Cen and J. Ostriker, (Princeton Univ.)